Abstract
The desire to directly touch and experience virtual objects led to the development of a tactile feedback device. In this paper, a novel soft pneumatic actuator for providing tactile feedback is proposed and demonstrated. The suggested pneumatic actuator does not use an external air compressor but it is operated by internal air pressure generated by an electrostatic force. By using the actuator, we designed a glove to interact with virtual reality. The finger motions are detected by attached flexible piezoelectric sensors and transmitted to a virtual space through Bluetooth for interconnecting with a virtual hand. When the virtual finger touches the virtual object, the actuators are activated and give the tactile feedback to the real fingertip. The glove is made of silicone rubber material and integrated with the sensors and actuators such that users can wear them conveniently with light weight. This device was tested in a virtual chess board program, wherein the user picked up virtual chess pieces successfully.
Highlights
In order to directly experience and feel the virtual reality (VR), various technologies connecting VR and the real world have been developed[1,2,3]
We tested and validated the polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) sensing ability to detect the changes in the finger joints: the sensor outputs were compared with the real angles obtained from the camera recording images, and they matched well[36]
We developed a new soft pneumatic actuator (SPA) and applied it as a glove system that interacts with the VR
Summary
We developed a new type of pneumatic soft actuator activated by an electrostatic force. The on/off switching of the actuator at the moment of catching or releasing a virtual object must be fast and accurate. We note that the actuator has the ability to provide enough tactile feedback during the time of holding a virtual object with the reaction speed under a few hundreds of milliseconds. The displacement can be varied by the input voltage amplitude (see Fig. 4). Even though the input power is a square wave, the amplitude change seems like a triangle wave. When the power source was 3 kV, it presented a square wave such as the input voltage (Fig. 4b). We conclude that the actuator is clearly controlled and the amplitude increases as the voltage difference of the input source increase
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